Pietersen’s unlikely Passage to India

A typical Merchant-Ivory film, their biography informs me, features ‘genteel characters’ whose lives are blighted by ‘disillusionment and tragic entanglements’. No surprise then that Kevin Pietersen is proudly revealed as one of their biggest admirers. In an unusual choice of images in his, er, thoughtful new autobiography, ghosted by the redoubtable David Walsh, KP says comparing English cricket with the Indian Premier League is like comparing Merchant-Ivory with the latest Bruce Willis.

It’s a fair point, but hard to imagine the teenage Kevin trawling the arthouse cinemas of Pietermaritzburg in the 1990s for the latest offering from the wistful duo. Few people of course know more about disillusionment and tragic entanglements than KP: Room with a View, anyone? Or maybe Howards End? More like Flower’s End. A Passage to India? Ah, now you’re talking, KP. Delhi it is.

In fairness to poor old Kevin, amid the bleating, boasting, moaning and self-absorption, he does have a point about the dressing-room bullying and the fake KP Twitter account. It would have been perfectly obvious that Bresnan, Swann and Broad were endlessly popping little bits on to Twitter as @kpgenius — ‘Hey Swanny, this is a good one’ — but the management chose not to stop it.

It was a failure of leadership by Andrew Strauss and Andy Flower, not to mention the ECB hierarchy, not to sort it out. I think they chose not to deal with it because they were secretly hoping that Pietersen would fail, and then he could be dropped. It is a rum state of affairs when a handful of people in a very small elite group are allowed to undermine a fellow member.

In related cultural news, it is fascinating to see that Roddy Doyle, heavily garlanded Booker author, had written the other sporting neutron bomb of the week, Roy Keane’s memoirs.